What is Civil Defense, and why should your local gov implement it? City Innovation Lead Sean Audain shares Wellington’s efforts to protect its community, from earthquakes (30+ > mag 2.0 in May 2021 alone) to pandemics (like Covid-19).
Take a deep dive into Wellington’s innovative efforts; from implementing a strong “Civil Defense” to establishing “rules as code”. If you don’t know know what these are, or really want to explore how to implement them successfully, this podcast with Innovation Lead Sean Audain of Wellington City Council, New Zealand is a must-listen.
More info:
Featured government: Wellington City Council, New Zealand
Episode guests: Sean Audain, City Innovation Lead
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano (00:05):
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the wiki for local government innovation snd on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today, Olivia from our team chats with the city of Wellington New Zealand, they're being recognized for their work in leveraging technology and how they approach resilience. Their civil defense strategy has enabled them to better serve their residents through technology to quickly identify and rectify issues. I'll turn now to Olivia to dive into this important initiative with Wellington's city's Innovation Lead Sean Audain.
Olivia Labonté (00:49):
Hi, I'm Olivia from Govlaunch and I'm here with Sean Audain from Wellington New Zealand. Sean, tell us a little about your role.
Sean Audain (00:57):
Well, I'm a city innovation lead at Wellington City Council. So my job is to look at what are we doing in the city? Where do we want to get to? And what's the difference between those two things and how can we essentially change our default behavior to get to where we need to go.
Olivia Labonté (01:14):
Really exciting mandate that is, so how are things going in Wellington's innovation realm, just generally speaking?
Sean Audain (01:22):
Well, innovation is all about going to the edge and finding what the problems are and try to solve them. So it's going well, but it never feels like it's going well.
Olivia Labonté (01:33):
Of course. Uh, what are some projects that your team is working on currently?
Sean Audain (01:38):
So we're busily exploring rules as code. So the encoding of legislation and regulation and to machine executable form, I've been playing a great deal with the city digital twin lately, and that's been enormously helpful in the COVID response. And just lately we've been trying to work through what does a modern library look like and how does that fit with our indigenous culture and the cultures of the developing in our city?
Olivia Labonté (02:05):
So lots of projects on the go and, uh, we'd love to focus in on some of the exciting work you're doing in the realm of civil defense today. Could you start off by explaining what that is exactly and a little bit more about that project in particular?
Sean Audain (02:19):
So civil defense for the council is a capability, is the ability to understand what's happening to our city and then intervene to try and fix that problem and understand what that intervention is doing as the situation develops. So cities often experience shocks, things like earthquakes, pandemics, storms, all sorts of things that ruin our daily lives. Civil defense is basically how our city changes shape to deal with those crises. So that means how we deal with understanding what's happened to our buildings, and our people, after an earthquake. How do we clear the roads after a storm, all that kind of stuff.
Olivia Labonté (03:03):
And so what is a Wellington doing exactly to embed some, some civil defense into, into its community?
Sean Audain (03:11):
So the best civil defense is a community that is active, aware, and looking after itself because we just don't have enough council workers to look after everybody after an event. So what we've been doing is working to understand what our operations are and then how do we best understand what's happening to our city and respond to it? And so for us, that's been quite an interesting digitization journey. So a really simple example is what we've done with understanding what's happening to building stock. So we live on the boundary between the Australian plate and the Pacific plate. And basically we've got a plate boundary that runs through right through the middle of our city. That means we, one of the most seismically active areas on earth, and we've found all sorts of ways to cope with that. We have these things we invented called base isolators, they're sort of like ball-bearings that sit under the buildings and let the building go back and forth independently of the ground. It's alarming until you get used to it, but it's quite good at keeping the building standing up. But the, some of the, what we've been doing lately has been putting a networks of seismometers through the city to understand what that shaking is doing, and then linking that to our civil defense capability so that we can actively brief our people about the buildings they're going to be going into. So that means that instead of a building inspector being sent out with a clipboard and forms, they have apps on their phones so that telling them what's happened in that part of the city, what's going to be the buildings they need to inspect. And then as they inspect them, all of that data is coming back in real time to me, and then being displayed in very large three-dimensional models of the city. And it lets us understand what's happening really quickly. And most importantly, it lets us draw the link between what's happened to a building and what's happening to the community of people who live in it very quickly so that we can make sure those people are looked after.
Olivia Labonté (05:08):
So you shared with us a little bit more about civil defense and gave us a great example. It'd be helpful for our audience if you could take us to the start and actually walk us through how you started implementing your own forms of civil defense within Wellington.
Sean Audain (05:23):
So Wellington's always had a strong civil defense culture. We had a very large earthquake, it was nine point something on the Richter scale just a few years after the city was founded, lifted the whole city seven or eight meters. So we knew we had a problem and that's built into the way we build our buildings. It's built into the way we live as well. And that makes it a real extraordinary resilient place. But we had an earthquake about seven years ago at a place called Sidin outside the city, just on the top of the south island. And that shook us a little bit badly, gave us a bit of a wake up call. And what we found during that process was that we needed to be able to respond a lot more quickly than we were. And it was at a time when technology particularly digital technologies were becoming much more available to us to use.
Sean Audain (06:14):
So we started experimenting with different GIS, different map making type software, et cetera. And then a few years after that, we had a much larger earthquake and that was much more damaging to the city because the, although that was also at the top of the south island, what happened there was the energy from that earthquake was focused northwards along the fault lines, and it basically smashed straight into the city. And so what we did there was we deployed our teams as we had before. But this time we called them a lot more of our digital people. And we started to experiment as we, as we worked out where we had safe ground to experiment on. So one of the things we did was we switched from using paper maps to digital maps, to large digital models of the city. And what that did is it meant that our decision makers, rather than going through the abstraction of reading a map, particularly in environments, where there may not be that familiar, they were dealing with large models of the area. They could recognize the buildings, they could see the streets. It became a much more familiar environment, but also created a focus were lots of different disciplines like engineers, architects, emergency managers, geologists could basically point at the thing everybody recognized and explain what it meant from their point of view and from their scientific knowledge. And it sped up decision-making enormously and it clarified things, a great deal. And one of the really important things to authentic communication is a certainty. So if you have that, you can really start to control a situation a lot better.
Sean Audain (07:53):
And then as life has gone forward, what we've done is built the type, those types of tools into our daily work. So the types of mobile inspection tools we use on officer's devices are also used day-to-day for other purposes, because one of the worst things you can do in a highly stressed situation is to try and learn something new. It's a lot easier to already know how to use something concentrated on using it really well, and then learn how you can make things better. Once things settle down a little bit.
Olivia Labonté (08:24):
Thank you for sharing all of that. It's interesting how the earthquake from a couple of years ago, nudged your team into being a bit more agile and actually to better leverage technology, which is quite familiar as it sounds a lot like what is happening now with local governments being forced by COVID-19 driven circumstances to actually digitize a lot quicker and to find new ways of working and delivering their services. Can you tell us a little bit more about whether COVID-19 has kind of impacted the way that you're doing things from the civil defense's perspective, or if you've kind of already had that journey a couple of years ago, and you really felt like you were ahead of the curve for this one.
Sean Audain (09:02):
So New Zealand's had a, uh, a different experience of the pandemic from most countries. We were very fortunate in that we were able to eliminate the disease quite early in the pandemic. And although we've had a couple of outbreaks in Auckland, on the whole, the actual transmission of the disease, hasn't been a feature of your average, New Zealand as daily life. That's still meant that we had to adapt though. So the way that that disease was eliminated was by putting the country until one of the most severe lockdowns anywhere. And we, if we have my team and the people I was working with, uh, contributing to that was making sure that the effects of that lockdown on the city, uh, didn't create further problems. So we were looking after making sure people were fed that they had access to housing and a place to lock down that things like logistics and supplies to the city were managed and also understanding the water situations.
Sean Audain (10:02):
So if we did have an outbreak, how were we going to control it? Which one, which communities were linked, what was the mobility like during a lockdown, all that kind of thing. This is a very new situation, quite different to dealing with an earthquake because you're dealing with effectively ongoing stress; in an earthquake basically everything happens at once and then you deal with the resulting mess. A pandemic is very, very different. It's kind of like having a very small earthquake every day that changes things ever so slightly and just makes everybody there a little bit more frayed.
Sean Audain (10:34):
And so for us, that meant pivoting that technology stack to dealing with finances. So one of the most important things for being able to sustain a lockdown was making sure people were fed and had access to food, medical supplies, all that kind of stuff that, uh, people can't do without. So we have a really active NGO sector. So what we said is we're not going to get council offices to start packing groceries and sending out care packages. What we're going to do is use this as a once in a lifetime opportunity to invest in that third sector. But to do that, we had to have data systems, which told us what effect are they having and what money are they spending? And so those kinds of data exchanges that were being used to manage things like building statuses were pivoted to manage effectively relief packages. So basically we created a shared data system where we could see how many people were being fed by which charity, which gave us an idea of how much need there was, which allowed us to very quickly release money to those charities. And it also allowed us to understand changing need. So we're neat the need move from supplying food to making sure people were warm and dry to some of the more mental health kind of outcomes.
Olivia Labonté (11:50):
So you touched on this a little bit at the very beginning around how a lot of your civil defense initiative actually rests upon effectively using IOT, which can sometimes be challenging to communicate and get public buy-in. So you've touched a little bit on this. It'd be interesting to learn a little bit more about how you engaged residents throughout the establishment of the civil defense initiative at the very start and how you continue to engage them throughout this process.
Sean Audain (12:17):
So, one of the great things about Wellington is the problems are kind of obvious. You know, there's a big plate boundary running down the middle of the place. We've all experienced earthquakes. So you don't have to worry about the first stage of that often affects innovation initiatives where people have to become conscious of the problem. They know. So what we were doing particularly in the IOT space was building on a couple of previous initiatives. So the first one was the resilience strategy. So we had joined the Rockefeller Hundred Resilient Cities, got a really great resilience officer. He had really deeply engaged various communities during the construction of that strategy. And because his office had a really has a really open way of working, there was already a good base around the problem and a good method of engagement. The other initiative that had contributed quite a bit was we had done a bit of a living lab probably about five years ago, where we had basically got a whole bunch of sensors and technologies and just started experimenting with them.
Sean Audain (13:30):
So we would, we'd done things like we'd measure populations of native birds using microphones and machine learning to learn their voices, just to see what happened. It was a really interesting project, more from the point of how you govern that kind of technology stack than anything else. What we discovered was that machine learning was a really powerful technology, extremely useful, and absolutely vital if you're going to have a sensor network of any size to keep it calibrated and to understand what it's telling you, but technologies that learn are not like light switches, a light switch will only ever turn off and on the lights. What we found was that these algorithms, particularly the ones that worked more as neural networks, their capabilities changed over time. So when it came to understanding the sort of democratic and privacy governance of them, it's really different, but because we had experimented with much less dangerous things, I mean, it's for less dangerous to experiment on a native bird than it is to experiment on a human, birds don't have privacy in the same way for a start.
Sean Audain (14:29):
It meant that we had enough experience to know essentially where the problems were. And so when we combine those two things of an aware community and clear and present need, that's that enabled us to start deploying these technologies. To be honest, the bigger barriers were more, a lot of the things we were doing for the first time. So for example, to make those large models work and then hook them in real time to officers who were working in the field that meant working in the cloud, working in the cloud, and then the environment where your connections are being disrupted because of the disaster you're trying to manage is a, is quite a brave thing to do. Uh, once we started to work through it, we found that actually it was easier to defend a link to the internet than it was to defend the link to a data center, particularly when that data center happened to be on the other tectonic plate.
Sean Audain (15:19):
So that was kind of one of those insights about how you practice innovation and particularly the public sector about understanding where it is safe to innovate. You have to create, it's very hard to learn anything if you're not in a safe environment. The other particular thing that underpinned that was the idea that it just had to be better. We didn't have to be perfect. We just had to do better. And so over time we, we grew our organizational confidence to, to be a bit, we saw it when we started to look at where were we going to deal with the managed isolation hotels. We use the same technologies, very large city models with understanding which buildings would be suitable and how they fit in with things like the flows of pedestrians around them, the retail economy of the city, to make sure that whatever facilities were chosen, wouldn't impact the recovery of the city in the longer term.
Olivia Labonté (16:14):
Lots of great words of wisdom there. I want us to focus in a little bit more on the element of data sharing. So you touched on this in your previous answer, and I know that that was also a really important element of underpinning the success of the civil defense initiative. Can you tell us about your experience in data sharing, especially when it involves third parties and other organizations and how Wellington has managed to successfully share their data and to receive data as well.
Sean Audain (16:45):
So shared data is a little bit different from open data and what we call closed data. So open data is available to anybody to freely reuse. It doesn't cost anything, and there's no real restriction on its use other than maybe acknowledging where you got it from, shared is data that is shared between trusted entities. So you have to be a trusted entity to use to access it. There are normally conditions on its use, and there are definitely conditions on its release. So you can turn shared data into open data, but there is normally some sort of governance process around that. And then closed data is confidential data it's things like people's identifies and contact details that stuff can never really become open data. And it's very difficult to make it shared data, at least in our system. So one of the things about working for a city is your problems tend to be extremely messy.
Sean Audain (17:40):
Any city is an absolute hodgepodge of overlapping jurisdictions, whether they're geographic, whether they're more jurisdictional nature in terms of, you know, it's a thing like policing versus healthcare, there's good reasons why you have specialists agencies that do things, but if you're dealing with a problem like homelessness, or you're dealing with something like begging or civil defense, you're going to be crossing lots and lots of those jurisdictional boundaries. And one of the problems you have is issues tend to disappear and reappear at each one of those boundaries. And what that means is it's really hard to solve them. So what we did was working in our social space. So one of the unusual things about our smart city initiatives is they actually come out of social services largely as opposed to the more engineering and sub transportation that traditional places you normally see smart city initiatives coming out of.
Sean Audain (18:37):
There are some reasons we did that. We figured that social and community services were far more difficult to do. Then those other things that the market already seem to be doing. So we figured we'd do those things and figure out what that meant, which has worked out quite well. But for data sharing, what that meant was we were dealing with problems like begging, homelessness, antisocial behavior, things that were not, not really policing problems, but if, if we weren't careful they could become policing problems. And so what we did is we worked with our health board and our health boards around the hospitals. There are sort of a separate form of local government police, which is a national government force here in New Zealand, some of the supply aid into those communities and what we, we had a relationship with these people as part of a thing called the trauma intelligence group.
Sean Audain (19:35):
And they basically officials from the council and these different agencies meet every quarter. And so what we said is why don't we underpin your meetings with data, we'll take your relationship and we'll start to replicate it digitally. And so what that meant was opening up, sharing a bunch of council data, things like all the calls from our customer interaction system that we're looking at, things that were of interest to them. So those graffiti reports of begging all those sorts of things. So taking anonymized data, making that available, and then working with places like the hospital emergency room to make their data available. And so what happened was inside this system, you started to see at a population level because it's all anonymized before it goes, then you started to see patterns occurring. So one of my favorite ones was we noticed there were spikes in the number of falls on certain days.
Sean Audain (20:33):
And so when we tracked those, those from the emergency room data, back to the ambulance status, the ambulance is a charity here in Wellington. We found that most of those falls were coming from one area of the city, looking at the council data for who's been assisted. Actually, they were all coming from the stadium. And so when we went for a walk around the stadium, we found one of the steps was broken. So we put some concrete on it and the number went down. So in terms of, you know, budgets for concrete council has that we probably didn't even notice the concrete gone, frankly, but it's a lot easier to fix a step than it is to fix a person that's a lot cheaper as well. And so essentially what we're doing with these shared data systems is distributing the problem into the jurisdiction that's best able to solve it.
Sean Audain (21:15):
And what that does is in start freeing up capacity in another jurisdiction, which allows them to attack a problem that we can't solve. And so you end up with almost like a form of trading occurring, the way that it all works is by underpinning it with a series of MOU's essentially memorandums of understanding, which essentially say how the data is to be governed. They make sure the data is not contaminated as it comes in. It gives us a process for getting the data out again. And so an example of where we managed to get the data out again, was we were looking at a new alcohol by law. So we were looking to essentially ban alcohol, being drunk and certain parts of the city in terms of the streets so, and public areas. To do that we managed to get the police to release a large data set that showed all of the alcohol related crimes in those areas.
Sean Audain (22:09):
And so that was then, uh, put into a big digital model given to the counselors who were making the decision and what that showed them was what does the actual footprint of the problem you're trying to regulate and these other, from these other perspectives, and that led to some really interesting results. One of them was one of the alcohol bands didn't actually get implemented. The counselors looked at it and said, frankly, that's not actually the problem. We thought it was there. We probably better to work with these parties here and solve it through this method then using the law to try and solve it. So I think we saw the glimmers of evidence-based decision-making, which was always nice to see in the wild.
Olivia Labonté (22:51):
Instead of putting the onus on residents to report issues themselves. So for example, with the broken step, having to call in or email, or I have a bunch of people kind of resounding glee emphasize that there's a step that's broken. It's really fascinating how the data sharing actually enabled local government to use the data, identify and solve a problem, very powerful stuff, so thanks for sharing that. Do you have any advice you'd like to share and offer to a local government that's looking to implement its own ambitious civil defense initiative for the first time, or even just start implementing a resilience strategy centered around innovation.
Sean Audain (23:29):
So in terms of building a civil defense capability, one of the super powers that local government has is we are part of our communities wherein it every day with a level of government that is closest to our people, when we deal with civil defense, it's really tempting to take a quite militaristic or a very policing heavy way of dealing with it. But when you do that, you don't, you can't use your superpower basically. So, and then that starts to flow through, into the spirit and what you're undertaking your digitization. So the first key to digitalization, my experiences becoming digitally conscious, you have data it's in those spreadsheets, it's in those pictures, it's in those maps. People just don't know it's data. Once they know it's data then they can start to turn it into information because we hear a lot about data driven cities. To be honest, I don't really want a data driven city.
Sean Audain (24:23):
What I want is an informed democracy. That's a slightly different thing, and it creates a slightly different culture. And in terms of innovation, I used to have a clock. It was a wonderful clock. It was programmed so that it counted it up dollars and basically valued time. And what that does I put it on my desk. And we would see how many dollars it cost to make a decision and whether the dollars that cost to make the decision were more than the dollars we were going to spend doing the decision. Once you understand that you can start to understand whether it's worth experimenting or not. Sometimes it's cheap that you just have a go see if it works. If it works great, if it doesn't work, it's fine. And it will still cost less than the debates we were going to have about whether we should do it or not.
Olivia Labonté (25:06):
What's something that excites you about the future of civic innovation in Wellington,
Sean Audain (25:13):
What I love is the city is going through fairly unprecedented challenges. We're growing extremely quickly. The, that growth is causing all sorts of problems. It's placing our infrastructure under enormous stress. Housing prices. Housing prices have increased over 30% in the past 12 months. These are enormous problems, but they also provide an enormous opportunity, essentially that the disruption they're creating whilst it has mostly bad outcomes for people's lives. The disruption that causes to our ordinary systems also points to a way towards a better life as well. So it's a case of, yes, it's raining, but some seeds will grow from it.
Olivia Labonté (25:56):
I like that. We're looking forward to seeing more cities embedding resilience into their work. And as you put it so wonderfully earlier on becoming informed democracies, which is so important. Thanks for joining us today, Sean.
Sean Audain (26:08):
Oh, thank you for having me.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano (26:09):
Wellington civil defense strategy is a great example of the vital role local government plays in protecting its citizens. These trying moments can sometimes nudge cities into becoming more agile and tech savvy in their approach to resilience. In Wellington's case, an earthquake deeply impacted their city, but the pandemic has also nudged local governments globally embrace technology, and to put even more emphasis on residence safety and resilience efforts. To stay informed on Wellington's innovation projects and others come to Govlaunch. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, and this podcast was produced by Govaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.